


No Ordinary Cats

by philalethia



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cats, Catlock, Fluff and Humor, Holidays, M/M, Pining Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-02
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-03-04 20:42:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3088544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philalethia/pseuds/philalethia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mrs Hudson adopts a cat called Sherlock, who soon becomes bored being an only cat. So she tries to find a friend for him. Silly little AU in which Sherlock and John (and Mycroft) are cats.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I decided life is too short to not write shamelessly self-indulgent catlock. Happy New Year! ♥

It was Martha Hudson’s—Mrs Hudson to most who knew her, although she hadn’t actually been a Mrs for years and didn’t miss the late Mr Hudson overly much—new tenants who put the idea in her head.

They were a kind youngish couple: he a detective inspector with the Met and she working in the morgue at Bart’s. Not married, although none of the couples who had rented with Mrs Hudson had been, so it didn’t seem scandalous to her any longer. They were the first, though, that moved in with a pet, which Mrs Hudson had allowed despite her considerable reservations.

But oh, he was a lovely thing, their cat. All grey in colour, quiet, and regal and a bit fat, and although he wasn’t really _friendly_ in usual sense of the word, he would stay on your lap if you put him there and would consent to be stroked so long as you stayed away from his belly, which he seemed quite sensitive about.

It was a shame the sweet thing was stuck with a stuffy name like Mycroft, but as that wasn’t really Mrs Hudson’s business, she didn’t tell anyone she thought so.

In the months after Greg and Molly moved in, Mrs Hudson grew terribly fond of the cat and eventually decided to get one of her own.

*

The woman at the RSPCA tested Mrs Hudson’s patience tremendously. Following her about, asking questions about Mrs Hudson’s living situation, and making comments about all the cats that Mrs Hudson showed any interest in.

She was trying to be helpful, Mrs Hudson knew, which was the only reason she held her tongue and let the woman carry on.

That is, until Mrs Hudson paused in front of a cage with a gorgeous, gorgeous black cat inside, lying against the back wall licking his paw as though he hadn’t a care in the world. He was long-haired, with wispy fur around his face, and his tail was so fluffy it looked bigger than it probably was. He had a princeliness about him, the same as Mycroft.

Intrigued, Mrs Hudson peered at the little information card hanging from the bars of the cat’s cage, looking for a name.

_Sherlock_ , it said. Just as stuffy a name as Mycroft’s, the poor thing.

“Oh, he’s a pretty one, isn’t he?” said the woman. “Very active and inquisitive, though. Moody too, from what I’ve seen. Sherlock might be too much of a handful for… well.”

_For someone of your age_ , she didn’t say, although Mrs Hudson heard it quite clearly all the same.

The nerve! Mrs Hudson wasn’t even 80 yet, and she was plenty active herself, not standing with one foot in the grave and too feeble and senile to keep up with a playful cat!

No, she decided, she’d had enough of the woman at the RSPCA and _more_ than enough of holding her tongue about it. She drew herself to her full height—which wasn’t considerable, she knew, but attitude was everything—and raised her chin defiantly.

“Well, you can shove off then, can’t you, dearie? Because I’m certain I know what sort of cat I’m looking for more than you do, and a ‘handful’ is just what I want.”

Sherlock paused his grooming and cracked his eyes open, which were a rather lovely greenish colour. He blinked slowly at Mrs Hudson, which she fancied meant that he approved.

“Right then.” Mrs Hudson nodded and faced the insufferable woman, who was gaping at her. “What do I need to do to adopt him?”

*

Sherlock really wasn’t anything like Mycroft, it turned out.

There were the obvious physical differences, of course. Sherlock was lean and long. Perhaps a little too thin, in fact. Mrs Hudson dedicated the first week after she brought him home to fattening him up, but he was largely uninterested in food, feline or human, and seemed content to eat only the bare minimum to survive.

But there was also the fact that Sherlock was a great deal more chatty than Mycroft. Mrs Hudson thought sometimes that he meowed simply to hear himself talk, as he took to spending his afternoons and some of his evenings sprawled across her sofa, rolling from one side to the other, making happy little _mrrw_ and _mrow_ noises, then ignoring her entirely when she came to investigate.

As far as affection went, Sherlock swung quite erratically between clingy and aloof. Some days he followed her from room to room, darting under her feet, rubbing against her legs, meowing up at her, and being a general nuisance until she sat down and consented to stroke him.

Other days, he followed her from room to room but was otherwise intent on ignoring her, either lashing out or fleeing if she got too close. (And Mrs Hudson racked up quite the collection of scratches and teeth marks on her hands learning the difference between those two moods.)

Sherlock was an active cat, just as the woman at the RSPCA had said he was. He was playful, although not in the way that Mrs Hudson expected a cat to be playful. He turned up his little pink nose at all the catnip mice, balls, and dangly toys she bought him, as well as the cat bed that she’d spent a frankly absurd amount of money on, and he amused himself instead with rubber bands, pill bottles, shoes, and bits of rubbish he dug from the bin.

He liked insects, too, although he never properly hunted or killed any of them. Rather, he preferred to sit in plain view and watch them. Once, Mrs Hudson had caught him hovering over a beetle that had got stuck on its back. His pupils were blown wide, his furry ears were twitching, and his head kept cocking from one side to the other like the struggling bug was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. When she’d whisked it away, he had sulked, filling the silent flat with one mournful meow after another, for hours.

In short: Sherlock mightn’t have been the cat that Mrs Hudson had envisioned adopting, but she adored him all the same. She wouldn’t have changed a thing about him, she thought.

And then the destructive phase began.

*

Nearly two months to the day that Mrs Hudson had brought Sherlock home, she woke to find that bits of wallpaper near the floor to the left of the sofa had been stripped from the wall and scattered about the carpet. Sherlock was rolling in the mess, purring, a thin ribbon of wallpaper hanging from his mouth.

“Hey!” Mrs Hudson shouted. “What’ve you done to my bloody wall?”

The purring stopped, and Sherlock sat up, his eyes going wide and his ears perked in alarm. Then, when Mrs Hudson eased herself to her knees to examine the damage—there were dozens of claw marks in the plaster, the little bastard—the purring started up again, and Sherlock lolled and rolled like he’d never been happier.

Not quite a week later, Mrs Hudson came back from Tesco to find that Sherlock had dug up the carpet just in front of the flat door. Sherlock himself was lying like a sphinx amidst the debris, peering down at the tiny bundles of carpet fibres like he expected them to start moving at any moment. His tail seemed fuzzier than normal and flopped excitedly against the floor.

“Sherlock!” Mrs Hudson cried, dropping her bags, which made enough of a racket that Sherlock leapt up and skittered away.

When he’d calmed enough to reappear from his hiding spot, most of Mrs Hudson’s ire had cooled, and she let him climb into her lap, knead at her thighs, and butt his head against her chin.

“Were you trying to get out?” she said, scratching behind his ears. “Do you know what happens to cats that go outside? They catch diseases and get run over by lorries, and we don’t want that to happen to you, do we?”

Although of course he didn’t understand, and it wasn’t until much later that she discovered he’d done the same to the empty corner in her bedroom.

Then came the knocking full glasses and cups off tables, the eating her houseplants and sicking them up on the carpet, the throwing himself at doors until they slammed shut at all hours of the night.

“Sounds a bit like boredom,” said Molly, when Mrs Hudson had had enough one evening and popped by for a chat (Sherlock had tipped over his water bowl and then torn apart the tea towel she’d set down to mop up the mess). “He might need a friend. Why don’t you bring him round tomorrow, and we’ll see how he and Mycroft get on?”

*

A right disaster that was, introducing Sherlock to Mycroft.

Oh, he _loved_ the walk upstairs, wriggling in Mrs Hudson’s arms until he could put one of his paws on her shoulder and stretch himself as long as possible so that he could sniff the air, his little nose twitching. She paused once at the bend in the staircase and let him sniff at the wall, which he enjoyed so much he let out a little _mrrw_.

He loved Greg and Molly’s flat too. The moment Mrs Hudson set him down, Sherlock was trotting across the room and sniffing the rug, dashing beneath the long billowing curtains, rubbing himself against the sofa, batting at the laces of Greg’s shoes.

But Mycroft, well. Sherlock didn’t like Mycroft at all.

It was especially unfortunate because Mycroft was very, very interested in Sherlock.

From the moment that he caught sight of Sherlock, who at the time had his front half wedged in the fireplace and was nosing about excitedly, Mycroft’s ears had perked and his tail (which had only ever hung limply from his bum, at least as far as Mrs Hudson knew) gave a great wave and began to lift. He looked more alert than Mrs Hudson had ever seen him, and then he scuttled forwards to sniff Sherlock’s bottom.

It was hardly the best first impression to make, so Mrs Hudson didn’t blame Sherlock at all for reacting as he did: which was to spin around and swipe Mycroft right across the nose and then flee.

Mycroft gave chase, and what followed were the most stressful five minutes Mrs Hudson had had since her husband’s trial.

Greg lunged repeatedly for Mycroft, who was surprisingly agile for his size and evaded him easily, and Molly gasped and cried, “Mycroft! Oh, I’m so sorry. He’s never done anything like this before. _Mycroft!_ Leave him alone!”

But Mycroft would not leave him alone. He stalked Sherlock from one corner of the room to another, and it wasn’t until Mrs Hudson stamped her feet as hard as she could and shouted, “Stop that right this instant. _Shoo!_ ” that he finally left off the chasing, although he didn’t go far. He sat down a short distance away and just stared, his pupils massive and his tail quivering.

Sherlock was hissing and yowling. His tail had grown as wide as a toilet brush, and the hair on his back stood straight up. He wouldn’t even let Mrs Hudson near him at first, the poor traumatised thing.

Mycroft was a bully, Mrs Hudson decided. A great bloody monster. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever been fond of him, and certainly she never would be again.

“It’s all right,” she cooed, when Sherlock had finally calmed enough that he allowed her to scoop him up and carry him back downstairs. Every time she stroked him soothingly, her fingers came away covered in strands of his beautiful black fur. “You’ll never have to see him again.”

Molly popped by later and sat twisting her hands in her lap while Mrs Hudson coolly served her lukewarm tea and biscuits that were very nearly stale.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said. “Mycroft… well, he’s never been around another cat before, or at least as long as we’ve had him he hasn’t. So I suppose he got a bit overexcited. Greg thinks he was trying to play with Sherlock.”

_Monster_ , Mrs Hudson thought, pursing her lips so she didn’t say it out loud.

“But if he hadn’t done,” said Molly. “I mean… well. Have you considered getting another cat? Maybe one whose personality suits Sherlock a bit more?”

*

The RSPCA was busier than it had been the first time Mrs Hudson visited, so there wasn’t anyone available to trail after her and tell her about the animals as she browsed. Which was unfortunate, because she actually would’ve liked someone to interrogate now.

Had this cat ever been around other cats? Did that cat know how to behave itself? Would this cat be a good friend for her Sherlock, or would it bully him and chase him round the flat like a brute?

She passed over a little white ball of fluff with ears, a mottled brown cat with white paws, a sleek grey-and-white beauty, and a black cat with white patches and a pudgy belly. She nearly passed over an orange-and-white tabby as well, except that when she walked past its cage it reached one of its white-tipped paws between the bars and tapped her on the elbow as though to say, _Oi, not so fast!_

Mrs Hudson paused, turning towards it, and when it had caught her eye, it flopped onto its side and blinked cutely at her.

“Oh,” she said, charmed. “Hello there. Who are you?”

_John_ , said the information card on the cat’s cage. Male, approximately four years old.

“Hm. John.” A far better name than _Sherlock_ , that was for sure.

Mrs Hudson reached her forefinger between the bars and stroked his forehead. He made a happy _mrrrww_ and arched into the touch.

“Oh, you’re a sweetheart,” she cooed at him, as he let her scratch behind his ears and under his chin. “Very, very sweet. How are you with other cats, hmm?”

John didn’t answer, of course, although he did reach through the bars again to paw at her sleeve. His tail was bobbing gently against the cage floor, and very, very quietly Mrs Hudson heard him begin to purr.

“I’ve a cat who needs a friend. Do you think you’d like to be a friend for him? He’s had a bad experience with another cat, though. Might be a bit difficult at first. What do you think?”

Being sweet with her, Mrs Hudson knew, was probably not an indication of how he would be with Sherlock. After all, Mycroft had been—

Well. No, actually, she supposed he hadn’t been sweet with her. Not like this. John was nuzzling her palm now, purring like a motor. Mycroft had never done anything like that.

No, Mrs Hudson had a good feeling about this one, she decided. He seemed like a good choice.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll see what Sherlock thinks of you.”

*

Sherlock came running when Mrs Hudson got home, shuffling into the flat with a box that was surprisingly heavy, considering how small John was. Sherlock’s nose was in the air, sniffing madly. Smart boy, he already knew something was different.

“You might want to stand back,” she told him. “If this goes as well as it did last time, you’ll need the head start.”

She hoped it wouldn’t, of course, but it was probably better to be overly cautious. She set the box down a fair distance from Sherlock, who fortunately didn’t rush to investigate it but rather sat down where he was, his head cocked with interest.

The moment that John came trotting out, though, Sherlock leapt back, his spine arching and his already fluffy tail puffing up even larger. John spotted him immediately and froze, and for several long seconds, they simply stared at each other while Mrs Hudson knelt carefully down and prepared to intervene if necessary.

Then, with slow hitching movements, John began to slink towards Sherlock, his eyes wide and his tail lifted.

Sherlock’s ears went back, and he bared his teeth in a long, harsh hiss. Mrs Hudson’s heart, already pounding, began to do so even harder when John didn’t seem put off by the sound at all and continued to skulk slowly forwards.

_Well I’ve just made a hash of everything_ , Mrs Hudson thought, alarmed.

Then Sherlock’s hiss trailed off into a rumbling growl, and John stopped where he was, only a few feet from Sherlock, his paw lifted mid-step. His body was stretched longer than Mrs Hudson had thought possible—he seemed a very short cat, after all—and his nose twitched once, twice, before he simply turned, calmly as you please, and walked off to investigate the rest of the flat.

Sherlock looked even more shocked than Mrs Hudson felt, and nowhere near as relieved.

“At least he doesn’t seem to want to chase you,” she told him, and heaved herself to her feet again.

*

Sherlock dogged John’s steps for days, although he was always careful to leave a good several metres’ distance between them. He followed John to the litter tray, to the food dish, to the window he took to sleeping in in the afternoons.

Most of the time, John seemed content to pretend Sherlock didn’t exist, although occasionally when he was grooming himself he would stop to stare at Sherlock and then turn to Mrs Hudson as though to say, _What the hell is he doing?_

“Honestly, your guess is as good as mine, dear,” Mrs Hudson always said, and after another moment of silent consideration, he would go right back to grooming himself.

It was far from the friendly sorts of interactions that Mrs Hudson had hoped for, but as Sherlock’s random acts of destruction ceased after John arrived, she decided to consider it a success.

Besides, she quite liked John.

He played with the toys that Sherlock had turned up his nose at, and he slept in the cat bed she had spent a fortune on. He would come when she called, and climb into her lap when she patted it, and lie on her bed and warm her feet at night. A generally sweet, well-behaved cat.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she told Sherlock one morning, while he was peeking into the kitchen to watch John have a good long drink of water at the other end of the room. “He’s mostly ignored you, and you’re treating him like he’s a criminal.”

When John finished drinking and sat up to lick his paws, Sherlock reared back and dashed out of sight. Mrs Hudson sighed and went back to doing the washing-up.

*

Mrs Hudson had a lie-down one day after lunch, and when she woke, she went into the living room to find Sherlock curled into a neat little ball in the cat bed.

The sight took a moment to process, and then she stopped, staring down at him with a frown. “What are you doing? You’ve never gone anywhere near that thing before.”

Sherlock started at the sound of her voice, blinked up at her, and then stretched, both his front and back paws hanging over the edge of the bed. When he settled back down, he was lying with his eyes open and his head angled towards the window, where the tip of John’s tail was hanging from beneath the curtain, swinging lazily from side to side.

“Oh,” Mrs Hudson said. “Oh, _Sherlock_.”

*

“He’s got himself a bit of a crush, I think,” she told Molly the next day. (Mrs Hudson had mostly forgiven her and Greg for the disaster with Mycroft. They were good people, after all; they couldn’t have known their cat was an arrogant bully.)

“Oh,” said Molly. “I didn’t know cats got crushes.”

“This one does,” Mrs Hudson insisted.

And Sherlock really did. After the incident with the cat bed, it became terribly, painfully obvious.

Just that morning, for instance, after John had finished playing with his favourite catnip mouse (quite an adorable sight, which involved John crouching down a short distance away and then pouncing on it with so much energy that his little white paws went skidding across the floor), then Sherlock had taken over: clasping the mouse’s bottom in his teeth and tossing it up into the air. When it had fallen, he’d picked it up and nearly tossed it again, until he saw that John was leaving the room to have a wee in the litter tray. Then Sherlock had promptly dropped the toy and ignored it for the rest of the morning.

“Well,” Molly said after a brief silence, “I’m sure it’ll work out.”

Mrs Hudson certainly hoped so.

When she returned to her own flat, she found Sherlock carrying a dangly feather toy round and round the living room while John sat in the middle of the carpet, one leg lifted mid-groom, and watched the spectacle with wide, wide eyes. Sherlock’s little chin was lifted high, and he seemed terribly pleased with himself, trotting like a regal show horse while the toy’s handle dragged behind him.

Eventually, John seemed to tire of the show and went back to grooming his backside. It was then that Sherlock finally stopped, let the feather toy fall, and stalked moodily off.

Mrs Hudson found him in the bedroom, sulking in the corner where he’d torn up the carpet weeks before.

“It probably doesn’t help,” Mrs Hudson told him, “that the first thing you did was to warn him off. You’ll have to try twice as hard now.”

Sherlock laid one paw over the other, rested his chin atop them, and closed his eyes.

“Poor thing,” Mrs Hudson cooed. “Don’t worry. He’ll come around.”

Later, she sprinkled a bit of catnip on a plate which she set on the kitchen floor. John came running and dove straight into it: sticking his face into the stuff and then flopping down right in the middle of the plate, overturning it and scattering catnip all over the floor and himself.

Sherlock arrived soon after and stood in the entrance, staring.

“Well, come on,” Mrs Hudson said. “I got it out for a reason, you know. Calming effect, lowered inhibitions. It’s the perfect opportunity to make friends and get to know each other.”

John rolled from side to side, blissful. Flakes of catnip clung to his fur. Sherlock watched a minute longer and then simply lay down in the entrance, spreading out his long body and stretching his front paws as far as they would go. He rested his cheek on the floor and blinked longingly at John.

“Oh, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson sighed. “You clot.”

Sherlock spent the rest of the night spread out on one floor in the flat or another: in the middle of the mess of catnip in the kitchen after John had grown bored of it, in front of the telly while John was dozing in the cat bed. In that position, he looked especially svelte and handsome. His black fur was thick and lustrous, gleaming in the light, although of course the only one paying attention to any of it was Mrs Hudson.

“You’re really quite hopeless at this, aren’t you?” she said. “You’re lucky there’s no competition in here. He’d be already mated and expecting kittens before you got anywhere at this rate.”

*

Mrs Hudson was wakened suddenly in the middle of the night by a noise somewhere distant in the flat. It was a loud sort of chirruping sound. Made by one of the cats, she thought, although she’d never heard either Sherlock or John make such a sound before.

Alarmed, she climbed out of bed and rushed towards the noise, which turned out to be coming from the kitchen. When she got there, she threw on the light to find Sherlock perched on the table and gazing, unblinking, at the ceiling above him. His tail was jerking excitedly, his whiskers quivering, and he was making one long string of chirps.

Mrs Hudson shuffled closer, peering up at the bit of ceiling he was so fixated on, but she could see nothing there.

“Goodness,” she said. “You scared me to death. I’ve never heard you do this before. And you know you’re not allowed on the table, you berk.”

Sherlock paid her no attention, of course. He only shifted his weight slightly and continued to chirrup.

A noise of movement from behind made Mrs Hudson whirl around, but it was only John ambling into the kitchen, his tail up and waving. He walked to the table and climbed on top of it, where he sat right beside Sherlock and joined him in staring intently at the ceiling.

“ _You’re_ not allowed up here either,” Mrs Hudson said, but was stopped from shooing either of the cats off when John began to make noise too. Not a chirrup like Sherlock, but rather more of a chatter.

_There must be something up there_ , she thought. She moved to the other side of the table, squinting upwards, and then she saw it.

A moth. A fairly small little thing and light greyish in colour, so it blended with the shadows on the ceiling. It wasn’t moving, although clearly it was alive; she doubted Sherlock or John would be making such a fuss if it wasn’t.

“All right, I see it,” she told them, although they continued to chirrup and chatter at it. They weren’t going to shut up about it anytime soon, she supposed. “Let me pop in the loo for a minute, and then I’ll get rid of it.”

Mrs Hudson left to empty her bladder, and then she wrapped her warmest dressing gown around her and fetched a broom before she went back to the kitchen.

To her surprise, the chirruping and chattering had stopped, and both cats were off the table, although they hadn’t gone far: only to the floor just beside it. Sherlock was sitting, sphinx-like, while John circled him. Between Sherlock’s spread front paws, she saw, was the moth trying frantically to crawl away. Sherlock was wearing the curious, fascinated expression he usually wore when he was dealing with bugs, but John’s body language was that of a hunter: intense concentration, sly loping movements. He looked like a miniature tiger stalking his prey.

As Mrs Hudson watched, the moth tried to take flight, and managed to rise just above Sherlock’s head before John sprang and knocked it from the air. It made a sad little thud as its body bounced on the lino, and then Sherlock and John were scampering forwards, taking up their positions again (Sherlock containing it between his paws and John circling him) before it could crawl away.

This time, though, Sherlock wasn’t watching the moth any longer; his eyes were following John’s path. And when the moth tried to fly and John knocked it from the sky once more, Sherlock’s furry little ears twitched with interest, and his eyes seemed to glow.

Mrs Hudson found she didn’t have the heart to ruin the moment.

“Well,” she said, “looks like you two have this under control. Back to bed for me, then. Good night.”

As she flipped the kitchen light off on her way out, she heard the moth hitting the lino with another thud and the cats’ paws padding eagerly to capture it again.

*

In the morning, the flat was silent. Mrs Hudson’s feet were cold; it was the first time in weeks she hadn’t had a cat to warm them during the night.

She put on her slippers and went into the living room, where she was greeted with the sight of Sherlock and John both in the cat bed. John was curled into a tight ball in the centre, asleep with his head on his paws, and Sherlock was wrapped around him, wide awake and grooming behind John’s ears.

“Oh,” said Mrs Hudson. “I see. Apparently you knew _exactly_ what you were doing, hm?”

Sherlock acknowledged her with only a tiny dismissive flick of his ear. Then he dipped his head and licked with no small amount of enthusiasm at the corner of John’s jaw. The touch made John shudder partly awake, and he stretched and rolled towards Sherlock, arching so that Sherlock could lick his throat instead.

Smiling to herself, Mrs Hudson went off to make breakfast.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Life is still too short to not write shamelessly self-indulgent catlock. Happy National Cat Day and (early) Halloween! ♥

The trial run went poorly.

Sherlock was curious enough about the hat (a cat-sized deerstalker, with thick velcro straps to keep it in place) when it was sitting innocuously on the sofa arm. He sniffed it, batted at it, even knocked it to the floor and had a tussle with it, holding the straps between his teeth while he kicked at it with his back paws.

But when Mrs Hudson scooped up the hat and tried to set it on Sherlock’s little head, he grew rather less keen.

“Just one picture, Sherlock, that’s all,” Mrs Hudson said, still clutching the hat although the scratches on her hands stung terribly; the deepest two had even begun to bleed. “You don’t want to be like Mycroft, do you?”

That was what had started the whole thing, days ago: Mrs Hudson and Molly discussing over tea the ever-rising popularity of Halloween—the number of people these days who not only dressed up themselves but also dressed up their pets—and Molly sighing as she admitted that her cat wouldn’t stand for being put in costumes, not even for short periods of time. _Of course not_ , Mrs Hudson had thought. _He’s a brute, isn’t he?_ She’d been so certain that her own cats would be better behaved.

Obviously she’d been mistaken.

Sherlock, a short distance away from where Mrs Hudson stood with the hat, flattened his ears and hissed. The thick black fur along his back stood up straight until he actually looked quite festive: an appropriately Halloween-ish black cat.

“Oh come off it,” Mrs Hudson scolded. “It wouldn’t hurt you to cooperate for once, would it?”

Sherlock growled, long and deep, then turned and bolted from the room. He scampered past John, who was frozen mid-step beside the sofa and staring wide-eyed at Mrs Hudson. _What the hell did you do to him?_ he seemed to ask.

“You’re next, young man,” said Mrs Hudson sharply. “I’ve got a nice pirate hat for you.”

John’s left ear twitched, his only reaction.

First, though, Mrs Hudson needed to tend to the scratches on her hands, which had puffed up and begun to throb. She dropped the miniature deerstalker onto the sofa arm on her way to the bathroom, where she cleaned the wounds and covered them with a few plasters.

When she returned to the living room, John was gone. She trailed through the flat, looking for him, and eventually found him huddled beneath the bed with Sherlock. Or rather, Sherlock was huddled while John lay behind him, licking vigorously at the soft tufts of fur around Sherlock’s ears.

 _There, there_ , Mrs Hudson imagined him saying. _You’re safe now. I’ll hold her off if she gives it another go._

Sherlock’s eyes opened to thin slits, which glowed ominously in the darkened space. His gaze fixed unerringly on where Mrs Hudson was knelt uncomfortably on the floor.

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine. I’ll leave you two alone then, shall I?”

Mrs Hudson stood slowly and awkwardly, gripping the mattress to keep her balance. When she was more or less on her feet again, she swept the wrinkles from her skirt and left.

*

Sherlock gave the deerstalker a wide berth after that. Every time he passed the sofa, he lowered his body and slowed his movements to a wary slink, peering at the sofa arm where the hat was, as though he expected it would leap off on its own and try to attach itself to his head.

“Berk,” Mrs Hudson told him, albeit fondly, while she watched him. She could hardly blame him, she supposed. She wouldn’t much like it if someone tried to force something on her head either.

She snatched up the hat—Sherlock positively leapt off the rug in alarm and skittered off, growling—and carried it to the kitchen. She set it on the table, where John and Sherlock were ostensibly not allowed (although she did occasionally discover the smudges of little pawprints on the polished wood when she woke in the morning).

She intended to wait a few days before broaching the issue of the pirate hat. Not because she was concerned about John, who was generally less excitable than Sherlock. He would tolerate Mrs Hudson clipping his claws every other week with nothing more than a low _mrraoww_ of discontent. The one time she’d tried to do the same to Sherlock, he’d become such a squirming, biting, scratching ball of fluffed-up fur that Mrs Hudson had let him go and didn’t dare try again.

No, she was fairly certain that John would allow the hat (black with a white skull printed on the front and two wispy feathers sticking out) to be strapped to his head at least long enough for Mrs Hudson to coo at him and snap a few photos, which she would show to Molly and Greg with no small amount of smugness.

Instead, she left the kitchen after lunch to find Sherlock sprawled on the living room floor, rolling from one side to the other and rubbing his little face blissfully against the pirate hat. He must’ve nicked it when Mrs Hudson wasn’t paying attention. Both feathers were wet and matted, one of them bent in the middle.

John, sunning himself in the window as he often did in the afternoons, had turned his head towards Sherlock and was watching the spectacle avidly.

“That was meant to be John’s, you know,” said Mrs Hudson, although she couldn’t quite bring herself to be put out by it, not when Sherlock seemed so pleased with himself. “And look what you’ve done to it.”

With a string of contented _mrrw_ s, Sherlock twisted and flopped and lolled about until he rolled right on top of the hat, thoroughly squashing it and startling himself in the process. His head jerked up; his fur was mussed and one ear folded back. With wide eyes he looked to John, who turned immediately towards the window as though pretending he hadn’t just been staring.

“Well then,” said Mrs Hudson. As she walked past, she bent to pat Sherlock’s head and, well-accustomed to Sherlock’s behaviour now, yanked her hand away just in time to miss a playful (and painful) swat. “We’ll just have to get John something else, won’t we?”

*

“This was all they had left,” Mrs Hudson told John, who had poked his head into the costume shop bag the moment she had set it on the floor and was sniffing at the contents.

It was a bit of a fib. It was true enough that the pet area of the shop, which hadn’t had an especially impressive selection to begin with, had been quite sparse during Mrs Hudson’s second visit. Owing, she supposed, to the coming holiday and the number of Londoners keen for a reason to dress up their pets in silly costumes. Still, she’d managed to scrounge up a few options, including what she thought was meant to be a fairy costume (there were sparkly purple wings and a tiny taffeta skirt) and a white coat with a printed stethoscope design on the front.

Neither of those had appealed. The white coat looked a bit cheap, and she worried Greg or Molly might misunderstand the fairy costume, given the cat that John had taken up with (as far as one neutered cat could take up with another, at least).

So Mrs Hudson had chosen the thin, cat-sized (dog-sized, really, but fortunately some dogs were about the size of a cat) jumper with a camouflage design. Perhaps not technically a _costume_ , as she’d found it amongst the other plain pet jumpers, but as it reminded Mrs Hudson of a pair of Army fatigues, she supposed it would do in a pinch.

And John was interested, if his sniffing was anything to go by. Sherlock, meanwhile, was peeking warily from the kitchen. Mrs Hudson could hear his tail thumping anxiously on the lino.

“Shall we give it a go?” Mrs Hudson asked John, and at the sound of her voice, his little ginger head popped immediately out of the bag.

As close to a yes as she was going to get, she supposed. She knelt, slowly and gingerly, to the floor and hefted John (who was a touch heavier than she remembered) into her lap. He let out a meow that ended in a squeak.

“All right?” Mrs Hudson asked. Although she let go, giving the option to flee if he wanted, John stayed where he was, perched on her thighs. His head was angled towards the kitchen, where Mrs Hudson saw that Sherlock had emerged and now sat regally in the entrance, surveying the scene with an expression like he didn’t know what was going on but he certainly didn’t approve. “I know _you_ wouldn’t stand for it, but John’s not quite the drama queen that you are. Are you, John?”

John said nothing as he was dressed in the little Army jumper, although his ears flew back and his expression looked more and more baffled as both of his front legs were gently coaxed, one by one, into the leg holes and then the jumper fastened around his body.

The jumper was larger on John than Mrs Hudson had anticipated, enough so that she could fit her whole hand inside without squishing John’s soft tummy. But that was all right, she decided. Better too loose than too tight. She plopped John on the floor and sat back to observe him.

If anything, the size of the jumper made it even more adorable. With John standing on all fours, it hung down like an overly large belly and seemed to swallow him like a child wearing their parent’s coat. An accompanying hat and a pair of Army tags would’ve been a small improvement, Mrs Hudson thought, but there was nothing for it.

“Ohh look at you,” she said, clasping her hands in delight. “What a handsome soldier you make. I’ll just grab the camera—”

Carefully, shakily—Mrs Hudson quite loathed her hip these days—she lifted herself to her feet, then paused as John gave an almighty, twisting, full-body shake. It was followed swiftly by another, even stronger shake, this one so vigorous that it upset his balance and he wobbled a bit on his paws. His ears were still flat on his head and his eyes were as wide as saucers. He took a single, plodding step forwards and then seemed loath to take another, so he remained frozen and tense in the middle of the floor.

He was uncomfortable, Mrs Hudson realised. Uncomfortable and distressed, the poor thing.

And all for what? One picture that Mrs Hudson could show to Greg and Molly? Guilt swept through her like a winter chill. What a horrible pet owner she was, caring more about herself than her cats.

“Oh John,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Come here, love. I’ll take it off.”

There was a blur of black at the corner of her vision then, and she looked to find Sherlock skulking closer like a grim shadow.

“Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson sighed. “For goodness sake.”

Ignoring her, Sherlock continued his approach, his pink little nose and long whiskers twitching, until he could sniff with some gusto at John’s Army jumper. John twisted his head around to watch. The tip of his tail, hanging limp from his bottom, began to drum against the rug.

What happened next was too fast for Mrs Hudson to see. One moment the cats were standing together, Sherlock still snuffling John’s jumper, and the next there was a thunder of paws on the floor and a streak of ginger and black flying towards the back of the flat.

“Sherlock!” Mrs Hudson cried. She hurried to follow, but was halted by another ginger and black streak tearing past. She felt the swipe of fur against her leg and stumbled back, reaching for the wall. “Sherlock!”

Then came the skittering of claws on lino, followed by the groan and creak of a chair and a distinctly feline growl—John’s, it wasn’t quite as low as Sherlock’s, the poor dear—a dull thud, a series of scrambling noises, and finally the heart-stopping _smash_ of glass shattering.

Both cats barrelled from the kitchen, John dashing all the way to the bedroom while Sherlock stopped in the living room and spun around. His tail was high, thrashing, and fluffed up to twice its usual size; his ears were perked. He stared into the kitchen before turning his owlishly wide eyes to Mrs Hudson.

 _What the bloody hell was that?_ said his expression.

“That was you, you clot!” With a furious huff, Mrs Hudson marched towards the kitchen. “You’re no better than Mycroft after all, are you? And if that was any of my good china you broke, Sherlock, I swear….”

It wasn’t her good china, but there were two glasses smashed to bits on the floor. Knocked off the worktop where they’d been drying, she supposed. The little bastard.

The rest of the flat was silent. Both cats hiding now, startled by the crash, Mrs Hudson assumed, which was quite all right with her. If John and Sherlock weren’t underfoot, then they wouldn’t trod on the glass shards and hurt their little paws. Mrs Hudson could find them both and remove John’s jumper after this mess had been cleaned up.

She fetched the broom and dustpan from the cupboard in the hallway and spent the next several minutes sweeping up every piece of broken and depositing it all in the rubbish bin. When Mrs Hudson was finished, she put away the broom and dustpan and set out to find her two cats.

To her surprise, she found both at the foot of her bed. John was curled up, his paws tucked under him, looking like a fuzzy loaf of bread while Sherlock, sprawled beside him, butted his head again and again into the bulging Army jumper around John’s body. His eyes were closed and he looked positively euphoric, while John stared unblinking at Mrs Hudson.

 _See what I have to put up with?_ he seemed to say.

“Oh you two,” Mrs Hudson cooed, unable to help herself.

Sherlock’s ears twitched, but otherwise he ignored her. He mashed his face into the jumper so roughly that it made John sway and then list onto his side, looking disgruntled as Sherlock flopped on top of him, twisting his upper body and fairly burrowing his ears and the top of his head into the jumper.

Immediately, Mrs Hudson heard the deep motorbike-ish rumble of his purr. At the sound, John’s eyelids drooped and his tail curved at the tip and rose and fell like a gentle, sleepy wave.

 _My boys_ , Mrs Hudson thought. She felt warm and terribly, terribly fond.

It wasn’t quite the photograph Mrs Hudson had envisioned, but it would do. If anything, it was better. Molly and Greg would certainly be envious of her, after seeing John and Sherlock like this.

Mrs Hudson backed quietly out of the room to get the camera.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can thank (or blame) [starrysummernights](http://archiveofourown.org/users/starrysummernights/pseuds/starrysummernights) for this one. Happy holidays! ♥

Oddly enough, it started with John.

Often when the cats went a bit funny, Sherlock was the start of it, with John following after a fashion. So that was what Mrs Hudson had prepared herself for. She had a spray bottle of water at the ready (Molly’s advice, and Mrs Hudson heeded it, as she suspected the poor dear had seen her share of feline misbehaviour considering the monster she owned) and kept a keen eye on Sherlock as she put up the prelit artificial tree and hung colourful baubles (shatterproof and with hanging strings rather than hooks, also Molly’s advice) from its full branches.

Sherlock, however, didn’t seem to particularly care. Not about the tree, anyway. The box it had been stored in was another story. Sherlock delighted in leaping in and out of it, pawing and clawing gleefully at the inside corners, and rubbing his little cheek against one of the outside corners again and again.

“What a good boy you’re being,” Mrs Hudson cooed. She bent over despite her hip so that she could pat his head, which he lifted higher with a trill of pleasure, butting into her palm. “Seems I misjudged you this time, hm?”

Which was precisely when John, who had been napping at the foot of Mrs Hudson’s bed the last time she’d seen him, batted a bauble off one of the lower branches.

Mrs Hudson heard the scratch and swish of the branches being jostled, the thud of the bauble tumbling to the floor, and spun around just in time to see John giving it a solid swat with his paw and chasing after it as it rolled away.

“Oh!” Mrs Hudson said. “John!”

She went for the spray bottle, aimed, and shot. The water missed John by a hair, but it was still enough to startle him. He leapt backwards, eyes wide and ears back. When he saw the bottle in Mrs Hudson’s hand (which she shook threateningly, making the water slosh), he bolted towards the bedroom.

Sherlock went after him, although he paused by the fallen bauble and did a sort of half-pounce before he seemed to remember himself and carried on out of the room.

“Stay away from my tree!” Mrs Hudson called after them. Then with a heavy, exasperated sigh, she hung the bauble back on the tree.

*

To amuse herself later, Mrs Hudson hung (or got Greg to hang, anyway) a sprig of mistletoe from the ceiling above the cat bed where John and Sherlock slept cuddled together most mornings.

When they finally emerged from the bedroom, both cats stopped and stared up at it. John’s tail thumped with interest on the floor, and Sherlock cocked his head curiously from one side to the other.

“Seeing as you’re the only ones doing any snogging in this flat,” said Mrs Hudson, “it seemed appropriate.”

Sherlock was the first to get bored of the mistletoe-watching. He flopped onto his side in the cat bed and stretched long and lean, his fur gleaming beautifully. He rolled from one side of the bed to the other, making pointed _mrrw_ sounds, until John finally gave in and flopped down with him, letting Sherlock curl around him and lick behind his ears.

“There,” said Mrs Hudson, satisfied. “Isn’t that nice? Now stay away from my tree, you little monsters.”

*

They didn’t stay away from the tree.

Mrs Hudson woke every morning to baubles scattered about the flat, some as far as the bedroom and the kitchen. John was even cheeky enough to knock them off the tree and try to play with them right in front of her, sometimes while she was brandishing the spray bottle in clear warning.

In fact, after the first time, John didn’t seem bothered at all by the water, not even when the spray once inadvertently (he’d twisted his upper body, batting excitedly at a bauble, at the last second) caught him right in the face. He’d only trotted towards Sherlock, who’d been watching the spectacle lazily from the sofa, and then stood still when Sherlock hopped down to lick him clean.

From that point on, Mrs Hudson began to suspect he was purposely baiting her. Every time she would squirt him, he would leap towards the spray with his front paws extended as though trying to catch the water between them.

“I’ve you to blame for this, don’t I?” Mrs Hudson said one day to Sherlock, who was sat on his haunches a short distance away and peering at John, who was damp and excited, like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. “You’re a bad influence, you are.”

Sherlock glanced up at her and blinked.

“I’ll put a pair of antlers on your head, Sherlock,” Mrs Hudson told him. “Don’t think I won’t.”

(She wouldn’t, of course. She’d quite learnt her lesson with the deerstalker.)

*

“The water hasn’t helped at all?” Molly said, pouring Mrs Hudson another cup of tea.

Mrs Hudson accepted it with a sigh. “If anything, it’s worse now. I think John fancies the water more than the tree.”

It pained her to admit that, in this way at least, her own cats were more poorly behaved than Greg and Molly’s. As though sensing her defeat, Mycroft chose that moment to saunter into the kitchen, looking smug with his long well-groomed fur and his smushed snooty face.

Something about his proud walk to the water bowl reminded Mrs Hudson: “Do you and Greg give presents to Mycroft for Christmas?”

Molly laughed lightly. “What’s the point? No matter where we try to hide them, he always susses them out. Besides, there are so few things he likes.”

“Hmm,” said Mrs Hudson thoughtfully. “I wonder.”

*

She put the catnip-filled toy mouse, still in its packaging and wrapped in green paper with a red bow, in the top drawer of the end table beside the bed, which neither John nor Sherlock had ever shown any interest in before.

Hours later, the noises of frantic scrambling on the carpet drew Mrs Hudson to the bedroom, where she found the drawer cracked open and the wrapping paper and plastic packaging torn to bits on the floor.

Lying on his side, Sherlock had the toy mouse gripped tightly between his front paws while the back ones kicked gleefully at the mouse’s bottom and he gnawed happily away at the mouse’s face. He at least had the good sense to pause and look guilty when he spotted Mrs Hudson standing aghast a short distance away.

John, meanwhile, continued to ignore her, tossing the red bow, which was partly shredded now, into the air and scampering towards it when it fell.

“You two!” Mrs Hudson said, her hands on her hips. “You’re determined to do everything your way this Christmas, aren’t you?”

At least, she supposed, they were finally staying away from the tree.

*

Mrs Hudson woke at half three in the morning to a great crash from somewhere in the flat. She rushed out of bed as quickly as she could, but she’d figured out what had happened even before she reached the living room and saw it for herself.

The tree had been knocked over on its side. Several of the baubles had fallen to the floor, and a few were even still rolling from the wreckage when Mrs Hudson flicked on the light.

John was mad with delight. The fur along his spine was raised, his tail was puffed up practically as wide as a bolster pillow, and he bounded amongst the scattered baubles with more manic energy than Mrs Hudson had ever seen. Once or twice he even dove into the nearest bundle of flattened tree branches before chasing after a bauble again.

Not two feet away sat Sherlock, his eyes closed as he bathed himself avidly. His lovely black fur was uncharacteristically mussed, and Mrs Hudson thought he had a certain air of self-satisfaction about him.

“You little shits,” Mrs Hudson said. This time she didn’t even try to shoo them away. She only gathered her nightgown around her and fell back onto the sofa, exhausted at just the idea of cleaning this up.

Sherlock stopped bathing and stared at her, one paw halfway to his mouth and the tip of his pink tongue still poking out. Mrs Hudson put her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands and stared back.

“What am I going to do with you two?” she wondered.

Sherlock’s ear twitched. Then, tongue disappearing back into his mouth, he glanced around, eyes wide, as though he’d only just noticed the state of the room.

“You’re not fooling anyone,” Mrs Hudson told him. “How about if you and John had a tree of your own? Just a small one. Would you like that?”

Sherlock lowered his paw and batted at one of the baubles, sending it spinning towards John, who promptly hunkered down, wiggled his bum, and pounced.

Mrs Hudson decided to take that as a heartfelt yes.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cat John & Cat Sherlock: Illustration for philalethia's No Ordinary Cats](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7684009) by [WillowGrove](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WillowGrove/pseuds/WillowGrove)




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